Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead

by Livia J. Washburn

  “That’s good.” Ralston slapped him on the back. “Thanks, son.” Perry Newton still didn’t look very happy about it, though. Ralston sighed and went on, “Of course, we don’t know when we’ll get to go ahead with the tours. That detective from the sheriff’s office is acting like he’s going to shut us down until he solves this murder. He’ll be hearing from my lawyer if he tries a stunt like that.”

  “Finding out who killed Steven is more important than keeping the tours going, isn’t it?” Janice said.

  Ralston smiled humorlessly and put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “Ah, spoken like someone who doesn’t have to pay the bills.”

  She looked a little resentful at his attitude, as well she should have, I thought. She was upset about Kelley’s murder, and he seemed to be concerned only with how it was going to affect the bottom line. I understood how someone could worry about a business—I was sure as heck worried about mine right about now—but ultimately, human life is more important.

  Before father and daughter could get into an argument, the blonde who had helped Janice earlier with Maura Kelley came over to us. She slipped her arm through Perry Newton’s, and the way she stood next to him told me that they were a couple. It’s an indefinable something, but most people know that connectedness when they see it.

  “Have any of you seen Maura recently?” she asked, directing her question to the Ralstons and Perry, not me. Even though I was standing there, I wasn’t part of their little circle.

  “She hasn’t come back since the detective took her away to question her,” Ralston said. “He either let her go on up to her room, or he’s holding her somewhere else with a deputy guarding her.”

  “Why would he have a deputy guarding her?” Janice asked. “Do you think she’s in danger, too, Dad?”

  Ralston shrugged his heavy shoulders. “There’s that,” he said, “but you also have to remember: anytime someone is killed, the person who’s married to them is the most likely suspect.”

  Janice, Perry, and the blonde all stared at him. After a few seconds of stunned silence, Perry said, “You can’t believe that Maura would kill Steven! It’s impossible.”

  “I’m just saying what the police are thinking. And they’re probably not the only ones.”

  I thought about what he’d just said, and even though I didn’t really know the people involved, I knew that the statistics were on Ralston’s side. Most people who are murdered are killed by somebody they know, and the closer the relationship, the more likely the suspect. That’s just common knowledge.

  But I had witnessed first-hand Maura Kelley’s reaction when she saw her husband’s body with the knife sticking out of his bloody chest. She had been so shocked that she fainted right on the spot.

  On the other hand, she was an actress, I reminded myself.

  The question might well be, just how good of an actress was she?

  While I was pondering that, the blonde turned to me and put out her hand. “We haven’t met. I’m Lindsey Hoffman. I’m one of the performers here.”

  That last bit of information wasn’t really necessary, what with the elaborate upswept hairdo, the low-cut ball gown that left her shoulders bare and a considerable amount of cleavage showing, and the big hoop skirt with numerous petticoats under it that rustled every time she moved. She sure as heck wasn’t dressed for the mall.

  I shook hands with her and said, “I’m Delilah Dickinson. I arranged this tour. Which of the Gone With the Wind characters do you play?”

  She laughed. “Oh, I’m not one of the main characters. I guess you could say I’m just a generic Southern belle. Window dressing for the ball.”

  “You’re not being fair to yourself, Lindsey,” Perry protested. “You’re a fine actress. It’s only a matter of time until you move up to a better role. That is, if the performances continue.” He glanced at Edmond Ralston.

  The plantation owner jerked his head in a gruff nod. “They’ll continue…as soon as the blasted detectives tell us that we can get back to business as usual.”

  Perry turned back to Lindsey. “You know, with everything that’s happened, I’m sure Maura’s not going to want to play Scarlett again any time soon, if ever. With a dark wig, you could play that part, Lindsey. Mr. Ralston wants me to take over temporarily as the creative director, so…”

  A big smile lit up Lindsey’s face, making her even prettier. “You think so? You really think I could do it?” Then, abruptly, she covered her mouth with her hand for a second and looked shocked. “What am I saying? I can’t be happy about anything that happens because…because of a tragedy like this…”

  “Like I’ve been saying, life goes on,” Ralston said, “and so does our work. There’s nothing disrespectful about thinking ahead, my dear.”

  I wasn’t quite as sure about that as he was. While everyone seemed to be shocked and saddened by Steven Kelley’s murder, they were also thinking about how it was going to affect them. I supposed that was just human nature; I’d had several moments this evening, after all, when I had done the same thing, going all the way back to the commotion at the French doors leading into the garden. When I’d hurried toward them, all I’d been worried about was how whatever was going on was going to affect the tour and my business. Then I’d seen Elliott Riley with blood on his hands.

  And I’d still thought more about the tour than anything else, right up until the moment I had seen the corpse sprawled on the flagstone path.

  And speaking of Elliott Riley…

  There he was again, the rascal.

  CHAPTER 9

  He was standing by himself on the other side of the ballroom, a sour look on his face. I excused myself to Ralston and the others I’d been talking to and started making my way across the room toward Riley.

  He saw me coming and for a second looked like he wanted to run away and hide. I guess he figured I was mad, and he was right about that. At the same time, unless he’d killed Steven Kelley, none of this was his fault just because he had discovered the body. If he hadn’t stumbled over it, somebody else would have. But everybody has a tendency to blame the messenger at times, and I’m no different from anyone else in that respect.

  He gave me a curt nod as I came up to him. “Ms. Dickinson.”

  “Mr. Riley. Where have you been?”

  “What do you mean? I’ve been in here with the rest of this mob ever since the cops got here.”

  I knew that wasn’t true, because I’d looked for him. I suppose it was possible that I had just missed seeing him in the crowd, but I didn’t think that was the case. I couldn’t help glancing down at his hands.

  No bloodstains. They were clean, and the nails were cut short, I noticed.

  “You sneaked off somewhere to wash the blood off your hands,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It was a waste of time. Plenty of people saw you after you found Kelley’s body. I already told Lieutenant Farraday about the blood on your hands, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one. Anyway,” I added, thinking about those TV crime shows, “you can’t wash blood off well enough so that the police can’t find it. They’ve got those special lights that make it show up.”

  His jaw tightened, and he said through clenched teeth, “All right, already. I didn’t want to stand around with the guy’s blood on my hands. Do you have any idea how creepy that is? So before the cops got here, I slipped upstairs to one of the bathrooms and scrubbed it off. Damn near took the hide off, too, but it didn’t really help.” He held his hands open in front of him and looked down at them. “I can still feel it on there.”

  My anger at him eased a little. “How’d you get back down here without the deputies seeing you?”

  “I didn’t. One of them collared me as I was trying to sneak back into the ballroom. I thought that would be better than hiding in the bathroom and letting them find me there. I gave him some story about being sick to my stomach and looking for a place to throw up.” He grunted. “It
wasn’t that far from the truth, either. I keep thinking about the way that guy looked.”

  “You mean Steven Kelley?”

  “Was that his name?” Riley shook his head. “I didn’t even know that much. I don’t know anything about the guy, or what happened to him. I told the deputies that when they questioned me.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you did and saw out there in the garden?”

  “Why would I do that? You’re not a cop.”

  “No, but this is my tour that’s gotten all flummoxed up, so I’m makin’ it my business to find out what happened.”

  I didn’t really think about what I was saying. It just sort of came out in a burst of anger and frustration and determination. And other than feelings of natural curiosity, it had never occurred to me that I ought to try to figure out who killed Steven Kelley. But even as the words came out, they felt right to me.

  Riley looked convinced. “All right, all right,” he muttered. “I’ll cooperate, but only because I’ve got this thing for—”

  “Redheads, I know. What were you doing out in the garden instead of dancing in here?”

  “Why bother dancing when the prettiest woman in the room already made it clear that she didn’t want anything to do with me?” Even under the circumstances, he managed to leer.

  I suppressed the urge to give him a quick slap to the back of the head. “Just tell me what happened?”

  He shrugged. “I got bored. Decided to take in a little of that moonlight and magnolias stuff I’ve heard so much about, so I went out into the garden. I gotta tell you, the whole Southern charm bit is overrated. The moonlight was nice, but the smell of all those flowers was a little overwhelming. Almost sickening.”

  “Get to the part where you found Kelley’s body.”

  He looked offended. “Hey, you’re the one who said you wanted to hear all about it. I’m tellin’ you. I wandered around in the garden for a while and then started back in on the main path. If the moonlight hadn’t been so bright, I probably would’ve tripped over the body.”

  “But you saw it before you stumbled over it?”

  “Yeah. I thought at first somebody’d had a few too many mint juleps, if you know what I mean. I said, ‘Hey, buddy, you better get up from there before somebody falls over you.’ But he didn’t budge, and then when I got closer I saw why. You couldn’t miss that stain messing up his fancy shirt, and then I realized there was a knife sticking up in the middle of it.”

  Riley frowned and sighed, and I knew that going over the story again had rattled him.

  “Look, I’m not the nicest guy around, you know. I’m not just overflowing with the milk of human kindness, if you get my drift. But the guy was hurt, and I’m not some kind of ogre. I got down on one knee beside him and shook him to see if he was still alive. Then I thought I ought to take the knife out of his chest. I even put a hand on his chest to brace myself while I grabbed the knife with my other hand, before I realized I ought to leave it alone.”

  “That’s how you got the blood on your hands….”

  “Yeah.”

  “And your fingerprints on the knife.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to tell me how stupid that was. I know. Believe me, I know. I gave the cops a tailor-made suspect, didn’t I? But I never thought about that at the time. When you nearly trip over a dead body, you don’t think very straight, lemme tell you.”

  I’d have to take his word for it because I’d never tripped over a body and didn’t want to, thank you very much. And it occurred to me that his whole story might be a clever concoction, a way of explaining away his fingerprints on the murder weapon if he was the one who’d killed Steven Kelley.

  But if that possibility was so obvious to me, then surely it would be even more so to the authorities, and if Riley was the killer, he’d try to come up with something better. Unless he was counting on everybody feeling that way…

  I shoved those tangled thoughts out of my head. That was a good reason right there why I was a travel agent, not a detective. I could sort out a lot of complicated things, but a murder wasn’t one of them.

  “Anyway,” Riley continued, “I had a pretty good idea the guy was dead and I knew I couldn’t do anything to help him, so I ran inside and started looking for somebody in charge so I could tell them what happened. Then some of the people saw the blood on my hands and started yelling, and you and Li’l Abner came up, and since you’re the one who put on the tour, I tried to tell you what I’d found. I still wasn’t thinking any too good, though. All I could do was point and say that he was out there.”

  Now that Riley reminded me of it, I knew he was right. He hadn’t been the one doing the yelling; that was other people who had seen the blood on his hands. He was shaken up when Luke and I reached the doors into the garden, of course, but he was still relatively calm.

  “Did you see anybody else out in the garden?”

  “You mean besides the dead guy?” Riley shook his head. “Not a soul. Everybody else was in here, I guess, doing the waltz or the polka or whatever the hell dance it was.”

  I found it hard to believe that Riley didn’t know the difference between a waltz and a polka, but maybe he didn’t. Some people just don’t have any appreciation for music.

  Elliott Riley didn’t seem to have much of an appreciation for anything, come to think of it. He’d made disparaging comments about moonlight and magnolias and hadn’t been impressed with the plantation, the movie museum, or any other part of the tour.

  So why had he booked it in the first place? I could understand if his wife or girlfriend was a big Gone With the Wind fan and had dragged him along. But he was traveling by himself, as far as I knew. His reservation had definitely been a single, and he hadn’t acted like he knew anybody else in the group.

  I couldn’t answer the question, and I knew it was going to nag at me.

  “Nobody else was around the body when you first saw it?”

  “You mean like the killer bending over it, cackling fiendishly? No, sorry.”

  “You just make people want to slap you, don’t you?”

  He smirked at me. “Only women. It’s a gift.”

  I ignored that and said, “You’ve already told all of this to the deputies?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t see any point in lying. They would have just found out the truth anyway.”

  “But you haven’t talked to Lieutenant Farraday yet?”

  “Nope. I’m sure he’ll get around to me soon enough, though.”

  I suspected he was right about that. Farraday might have been tired, but his determined nature would keep him going, all night if necessary. Don’t ask me how I knew that, I just did. Stubborn knows stubborn.

  I might have kept on talking to Riley, even though I had a feeling he had already told me everything he had to tell—about his discovery of the body, anyway—but right then Luke came up to me. I could tell that he’d been looking for me, and that something was wrong.

  “Miz D,” he said, “the deputies are through with Augusta and Amelia.”

  “Thank God,” I breathed.

  But I had spoken too soon, because Luke went on, “Now that detective who’s in charge wants to talk to them, and to you, too.”

  I stiffened. What in the world could the girls have told the deputies that made Lieutenant Farraday interested in them? I was glad he wanted to see me, too, because that meant Augusta and Amelia wouldn’t have to face him alone, but at the same time that seemed to indicate it was something fairly serious.

  He had said earlier that it didn’t matter whether the girls were minors because they weren’t being charged with anything or even officially questioned.

  Was he going to question them now—or charge them with something?

  “Where are they?”

  “Right over there, Miz D. One of the deputies was gonna come looking for you, but I said I’d find you.”

  I followed him across the ballroom toward the main door. A small, grim-faced group
stood there, consisting of Timothy Farraday and three deputies. They encircled Augusta and Amelia, who looked young and frightened now.

  Before Farraday could say anything, I lashed out at him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Does it take four big strong men to surround a couple of scared little girls?”

  Even under the circumstances, Augusta said, “We’re not little girls, Aunt Delilah.”

  “Close enough,” I snapped. I glared at Farraday. “Well?”

  He didn’t lose his temper. He said, “I just thought that you might like to be present while I talk to your nieces some more, Ms. Dickinson.”

  “Do they need a lawyer?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I relaxed, but only for a second before I remembered how tricky police detectives could be. I didn’t know that from personal experience, of course, but I was pretty sure it was true.

  “We’ll just see,” I told Farraday. “If I think they shouldn’t answer your questions, I’m gonna tell ’em so.”

  “That’s fine.”

  He and the deputies escorted the girls and me out of the ballroom. Luke would have come with us, but one of the deputies put a big hand on his chest and shook his head. Luke gave me a helpless look, and that was the last thing I saw before the ballroom doors swung shut, leaving us in the hall with Farraday and the deputies. We started toward the office where Farraday had questioned me earlier.

  “You’re sure about that lawyer?” I asked him again.

  “Yes. Your nieces aren’t suspects in Steven Kelley’s murder, at least right now.”

  Then he smiled and said something that knocked me back on my heels.

  “On the other hand, before this night is over, you may want to be represented by legal counsel, Ms. Dickinson.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I might have stopped short in surprise at the implication of his words, but one of the deputies was walking behind me and put a hand on my shoulder to keep me going. You’ve heard about the heavy hand of doom falling on a person? Well, that’s what it felt like…even though I knew darned well I hadn’t done a thing to feel guilty about.